Bridging Systems, Building Trust: Advancing Water, Energy, Innovation and Sustainable Cities through Coordinated Policy Actions A UN DESA Global Policy Dialogue.

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Hello from United Nations Headquarters in New York and welcome to this Global Policy Dialogue on Bridging Systems, Building Trust, Advancing Water, Energy Innovation and Sustainable Cities through Coordinated Policy Action. My name is Robin Farzad. I'm host of Public Radio's Full Disclosure. I'm honored to be moderating today, and we're delighted to have you with us in person, online, through the Zoom, audio, however you like it. We're meeting during the UN High Level Political Forum, the central United Nations platform for reviewing progress on the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals. And our conversation comes at a particularly timely moment. With the release this week of the latest Sustainable Development Goals report from our host today, the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, the report offers a new assessment of where the world stands with less than 5 years remaining until 2030. Today we'll explore how more coordinated policies can help accelerate progress across the SDGs under review at this year's HLPF, from water and energy to innovation and sustainable cities. And how we can put people, inclusion, and trust at the heart of those efforts. We also want this to be a truly interactive conversation, so throughout the event, we'll be inviting you to share your views through our Slido polls and to submit questions for our panelists. Thank you for joining us from wherever you are in the world, and we have an in-person audience here in New York and many people joining us online via Zoom, UN Web TV, and Facebook. Welcome. We're glad that you're part of this conversation. We would like to thank the UN Peace and Development Trust Fund for making this event possible. And a few notes before we start. If you are watching us on Zoom, multilingual captions are available. You just have to click on the captioning icon at the bottom of your screen and select the language you like. I'd also like to welcome and thank our international sign interpreters for bringing this important session to a wider audience. This is an interactive session. We'd love your input in our polls today. We'll use the Slido platform for our polls and for our audience questions. You can submit your questions there and update your favorite questions as well. Head to slido/sdgs, that's Sam, David, Gregory, Samuel, or go to slido.com and insert the hashtag #sdgs in one word. We're also putting the link in the chat right here. Let's start by testing out Slido by voting in our first poll. I'd like to ask you, which factor is most essential for accelerating progress on the SDGs? Political leadership, public trust, financing, innovation, partnerships, or something else? And while you're voting, I'd like to introduce you to our first speaker, Mr. Lee Jun-hwa, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs, for his opening remarks. Mr. Lee, the floor is yours.

Thank you. Thank you, Moderator. Well, dear colleagues and friends, good afternoon. Welcome to today's UN DES Global Policy Dialogue. It is so great to meet some old friends and meet some new friends and new faces. Well, thank you for joining us this afternoon, both here in the United Nations Headquarters or online from around the world. Well, just now, as the moderator mentioned that with just 4 years remaining to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, we face a critical moment. The actions that we take today will determine not only if we achieve the goals altogether, but whether we strengthen the trust, solidarity, and cooperation to sustain the progress beyond 2030. This year's High-Level Political Forum actually focuses on 5 interconnected goals: water, energy, innovation, sustainable cities, and partnerships. Together, they remind us that sustainable development cannot be achieved in silos. The true progress always demands that all sectors, stakeholders, communities, and people have a voice in the conversation and in the discussion. Governments cannot deliver the 2030 Agenda alone, neither can the United Nations. Meaningful progress depends on effective collaboration across countries, industries, and communities. That is why meaningful dialogues like this matter. While the High-Level Political Forum convened the international community here in New York, But our policy dialogue this afternoon extends that conversation to the rest of the world. Throughout the hybrid interactive format, participants everywhere can engage directly with the leading experts and also with the young representatives. Building trust begins always from— with listening. By embracing different perspectives and working together across across the disciplines and borders, we can develop integrated solutions that improve the people's lives and accelerate the progress across the SDGs. I encourage you all to actively participate in today's discussion and pose your questions to the experts and to the youth representatives, and then help to build the partnerships and policy solutions we urgently need. Wish you a very productive and inspiring dialogue. Thank you.

Before moving to our first panel, let's see how our audience voted in that first poll and find out which factor you think is most essential for accelerating progress on the SDGs. If I can see closely, by far we see that partnerships, if I can say, 33% came in The leading thing— political leadership is tracking at 30% and partnerships is at 37%. Financing is at about 20 or 19%. This is real time. I encourage you to go in and Slido at SDGS to look at it, but it still remains partnerships with something else and innovation at the bottom. And it's going to keep updating. For those joining now, I welcome you indeed. And you can go to slido.com and use the hashtag SDGS to take part. I'm going to go straight into the second poll, which relates to our first panel on people-centered pathways to SDG 6 and SDG 7: water, energy, and social inclusion. I'm going to ask the question first and then introduce the panel while you are voting. Which action would have the greatest impact on improving people's lives over the next decade? Is it universal access to safe drinking water? Universal access to affordable and clean energy? Better water and energy infrastructure, stronger governance and institutions, greater investment in local communities, or something else? And with that, I want to introduce you to our panelists for this conversation related to SDG 6 for clean and affordable energy and SDG 7 for clean water and sanitation, two of the goals in focus at our forum this week. I'm happy to be joined in person by Adedoyin Adeleke, Executive Director of Green Growth Africa, He's also co-chair of the independent group of scientists preparing the Quadrennial Global Sustainable Development Report coming out next year. Seated next to him is David Smith, Director of the Center for Environmental Management at the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica. He's also a member of the UN High-Level Advisory Board on Economic and Social Affairs, H-LAB for short. And Avery Wallace, Communications and Operations Manager for NYCH2O, water conservation nonprofit here in New York. And joining us virtually, Åsa Persson, strategic advisor and researcher at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology Climate Action. She is also chair of the Swedish Climate Policy Council and a member of the H-Lab. She joins from Stockholm. Welcome. Thank you so much, everyone, for being here. I want to go back to take a quick look at the poll votes, poll 2, before we move on. In the lead is better water and energy infrastructure at about 42% tracking right now. And second to that is universal access to safe drinking water, stronger governance and institutions coming in third, and greater investment in local communities fourth, and behind that, universal access to affordable and clean energy. With that, I want to open it up. Let's bring our audience into the discussion right now. And thank you so much for sharing knowledge with this. I want to ask you for starters, Adedoyin, you know, we were talking offline about the huge explosion in solar. Surely you have a great story about the nexus of solar and water, how that power, like the superpowers, unite, especially in developing economies, for breakthrough developments.

Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Your Excellencies, distinguished guests. It's a privilege and honor for me to be here. Indeed, the potential for solar energy and water particularly when they are integrated, cannot be overemphasized. I think the question for me would be, what will energy enable and what will water make possible? When we look at the development dynamics and look at various variables that we can invest in, what should inform what variables we should invest in? Should look at what each of these elements and pillars of development will enable. I believe strongly that energy will have a lot to do with even providing water, for instance, to our education, to health. More importantly, I realize that with my experience across developing countries on energy issues, I realize that often, politicians and policymakers often assume that when you provide water or energy, for instance, it will automatically drive sustainable development. And I put it this way. So when you go to a village and you provide renewable energy, for instance, you're expecting there will be economic development, there will be jobs creation. But how does that happen? The woman has electricity access, but who provides the money? For us to buy new equipment that are electrified, that can scale up our productivity. Whereas we assume that electricity access will provide— will help improve education outcomes, but that student in the village only has lighting to read more. Who provides the computer? Therefore, this highlights very critically, and when we take a look at it across different sectors, highlight the need for coordinated investment. Oftentimes I see that we are not maximizing the impact of the investment we are making per sector because we are working mono-sectoral and siloed approach. When we have spent $100 million, for instance, on energy projects, possibly we may just need to spend $100,000 to incentivize something, maybe through soft loans for those women to improve their businesses. Probably we need to just do a little investment more on education, on health, things like that, that will incentivize the outcomes we are looking at. Overall, I would say that energy, for instance, particularly, is not an end in itself. It's a tool, it's a goal that helps to enable other goals, and we cannot assume that meeting the energy target will automatically drive us to achieve Sustainable Development Goals. Thank you.

David, I'd like to ask, it's no secret that climate change is making water security increasingly unpredictable, whether you talk about Miami, my hometown where you just were, you could be in Bangladesh, you could have been in New York and Superstorm Sandy, saltwater intrusion and the like. How can countries at every level strengthen resilience while ensuring the most vulnerable communities are not left behind?

I think it's very important to remember what my colleague just said. It's not just the thing that you're providing, the energy or the water, You've got to think upstream, you've got to think downstream. So with water, if you're going to provide water, that's great. It's very important to provide the pipes and the access. It's as important, if not more important, to protect the watershed that the water's coming from. And it may not even be your watershed. I have friends in Brazil who are always teasing me and reminding me that the rain that falls in the Caribbean comes from the Amazon. So I personally have a stake in whether or not people are allowed to cut the Amazon down to do whatever they want with it, whether it be raising more beef cattle or anything else. That will affect my life and affect the life of the other 40 million people living in the Caribbean. So we've got to look upstream. We've got to manage systems as systems. And bear in mind as well, sometimes there's stuff which we have no control over. Drought. Did you collect enough water beforehand? Did you start preparing for drought? Because sometimes it may not be that you didn't take care of the watershed. It might be that El Niño came, or it might be that dust came from the western coast of Africa, where you come from, and decided to take a trip to the Caribbean and sit there. And we end up with drought, and we end up with all kinds of problems. So we've got to think all the way back and put systems in place to deal with all those eventualities. And that's gonna cost a bit more than we thought the first time.

Avery, I'd love to ask you, as a former New Yorker too, what surprises people kind of at the door-knocking level, at the local grassroots level, the most about water security in New York? I mean, it's something you just take for granted, the great tap water here that makes world-class bagels, but a lot of people don't realize how much raw sewage goes into the East River and the Hudson, rainstorms, how much of the— we just had on the show the former head of the MTA, how much of that has to be drained constantly because of the natural watershed that is Manhattan today that goes back out into the rivers? Give me some anecdotes.

Well, thank you for having me today. It is quite an awesome responsibility to represent New York City local organizations in New York City. Like you said, we are incredibly lucky in New York City. We have a very reliable and clean source source of drinking water. Because it's so reliable, I think that's why oftentimes people know so little about it. I think the resources we know the most about are the ones that we have the least of. So, I would say— and you mentioned the sewage as well. I think not only is it important to know where your water comes from, but where it goes. New York City has combined sewage overflow, which means if it rains enough, the rainwater and your sewage is is going into the rivers. I think our organization focuses on teaching about where it comes from. What surprises— we work primarily with students, so we're doing public school students grades 2 through 12. What surprises the kids the most is our drinking water comes from, in many cases, over 100 miles away. We used to get our drinking water from within the city, so people know Central Park Reservoir. We currently consume enough water in the city to empty the reservoir every single day, Central Park Reservoir. So we are getting our water from these amazing sources. And I think for the kids, the most surprising part is it takes 3 days for the water to get to us on average. Our favorite— my favorite fact to share with the kids is the size of the aqueducts that bring the water here.

Here.

It's big enough to fit a school bus through, which is a unit that they can really relate to. Um, but yeah, I think New York City is an interesting case about trying to get people interested in water because, like I said, we have such a good source of it. We had our first drought warning in 20 years in 2024. I do think that that was an opportunity for people to learn a lot about our drinking water. And I hope that people can continue that interest without having to have that scarcity make them interested. And that's something that we try to do at our organization too.

Also, if I could bring you in from across the pond, well across the pond. What practical changes would you say help governments move from this siloed, siloed-mindedness, siloed decision-making to genuinely integrated policy when it when it comes to water and energy?

Thank you. I'm pleased to join you online. Well, I think that's the million-dollar question, how to achieve integration and coordination in important policy decisions and investments. And I think from research, and we actually looked at this just when all the SDGs were agreed, what can help policymakers make, construct really integrated policies. And I think we found 4 dimensions, and they have has actually been very much confirmed to me also interacting with policymakers since. But we saw that these 4 dimensions, one was a normative dimension. So really having clear political vision leadership that we do want to achieve both good water outcomes, good energy outcomes, good community outcomes all at once. And also having the courage to sometimes making difficult trade-offs. Sometimes you can't achieve all goals at once. A second dimension is organization. So this would typically be setting up more cross-departmental working groups or task forces, ensuring to have both the energy experts and the water experts. That's only the first step, though, and it's very important to also ensure that these different functions in government also have the legal mandate to really work for integrated outcomes. And also to have the right incentives in place. So what are the performance indicators, for example, that they are evaluated against? A third dimension is about procedures. So how these government functions make decisions, what safeguards are in place. We have, of course, the very traditional type of environmental impact assessment, where we can look at water impacts from big energy investments, for example. And I think the challenge historically has been to try to do these impact assessments at a more strategic level, so earlier in the decision-making process, and also not going— looking at the project by project, but really looking at the cumulative impact on, for example, water availability from multiple energy projects. And vice versa. The fourth and final dimension, and here I think research academia has a big role to play also supporting decision makers, is what we call a learning dimension. So this is more over time establishing epistemic community that really learns about all the interdependencies, all the interactions, and also all the smart solutions that do achieve multiple goals. And this can be done through developing analytical and modeling tools, for example, and working together with technical experts in government to find these very good solutions. But it's also actually meetings like the HLPF and reports like the Global Sustainable Development Report that tries to synthesize good practices. How do we integrate policies? So I think That's a start, at least. So, 4 key dimensions for good policy integration. Over.

There's a question that came in over the transom from Hong Kong that I'd like to pose to our panelists. Should countries come together to discuss a potential standard on microplastics? That's something that keeps me up at night when I think about potable water and how pervasive it is and how it's everybody's problem and yet it's no one's problem. Jump in.

There are UN meetings going on about microplastics. They're characterized, I think, by the fact that they're going very, very slowly, unfortunately. I don't think that the public fully understands how bad the problem is. Scientists have found microplastics in the bloodstream of unborn children. The only way it got there was that their mother ingested microplastics and it went across the placenta. If we are at that stage, surely we should be a lot more concerned and alarmed about microplastics and regulating them than we are, it seems. I mean, we already know it's part of our diet because we put it in, feed the fish with it, and then eat the fish afterwards. But we really aren't moving nearly as fast as we should be on this one.

The answer would be, of course. I think, I mean, as David said in the beginning also, our water is their water. It's all part of one cycle, and it is something that absolutely needs to be global partnership on that. And yeah, I mean, David said a lot of just— it is pervasive, and not only is it damaging to humans, it's damaging to all different trophic levels of marine organisms as well as land organisms. And I think to me that's an easy yes, I would say.

Yeah. Okay. Okay. All right. Thank you. For me, I think that a lot needs to be done to accelerate. My word here will be acceleration. We're already in the right direction in terms of putting the framework around it within the UN system. But I think we need to really accelerate the progress towards reaching a milestone that will drive change. But I'll say again, when you check some countries, you see that companies that produce these plastics are already taking initiatives on their own. When you check these same companies in other countries, everything goes. The difference is not the companies, the difference are the policies and laws in those countries. Within different countries. So I think the countries on their own could take action even at this point while the global framework is still being developed. Thank you.

A more whimsical question: if suddenly, you know, what would you do with $100 million to spend on this? I know that, you know, you and David were saying that you could, at a much different level downstream, affect a person's lives if, for example, the women breadwinners in the house are involved. The incentive structure is completely different from building, you know, large-scale investment. So have some fun with that. Where would you get most bang for the $100 million buck right now in terms of the topic of this afternoon?

For me, what would this— would help my decision-making on where to put $100 million will be to ask What will energy enable? What will water make possible? And oftentimes the answer is not straightforward. It's not the same thing in different villages, in different towns, in different countries. Depends on the different parameters within those different contexts. But again, I would say, because my background is in energy, I realize from science, from research I've done, to realize that when you have $100 million, for energy project and you spend 100% of it on energy variables, you are not likely going to achieve more than 40% of the impact of that fund because of things I've mentioned earlier. You need to incentivize the areas. We call them complementary actions. Without them, all that you will achieve with energy investment are just welfare impact. Of course, the guys can stay outside in the night because there is lightning now, but what happens to the economy? For energy to drive economy, there has to be complementary actions in those various sectors, that is the various SDGs. So, yeah, it speaks more into coordinated and integrated action. Thank you.

I want, I want to bring it in on our online forum if I can, and I encourage you to go there on the Slido template on SDGs. There's a question that came in through Jacqueline in USA: What role do you see for tech innovation in improving animal welfare while promoting sustainable development, i.e., wildlife monitoring or humane agriculture?

The need to be able to monitor and figure out where the wildlife is and how well it's doing. One of the things that we can do now is to analyze the DNA in the streams that flow through the places where you find animals. And that helps you to understand what's there and also the numbers of the people who are there. I also have colleagues at the university who are doing the same thing in the coastal environment. So monitoring is absolutely critical. You've got to know what's there and whether it's doing better or worse so you can know where to put your efforts in terms of protection and so on. So that's definitely one useful thing. Making access to data free and open would be also very useful. A lot of countries which have a lot more wildlife and a lot more rare and endangered wildlife have less money, and so their ability to monitor is compromised because they don't have access to the data. So finding ways of being able to make sure that they get access and that the access— that the data are free and open would be excellent so that we could at least monitor., and then start putting money into figuring out how people can manage land better so that the animals and plants as well are less— are in a better situation.

Osa, this is a composite of some questions that we have online, but from your vantage point, what is holding back an espousal of more sustainable energy solutions in the United States? We have an administration here that wanted to maybe throw some sand in the gears after there was some progress. But you're still seeing the adoption of EVs at a certain pace. You're still seeing distributed or rooftop solar. It has its escape velocity, a little bit in the United States, but impressively to my mind in developing economies. You go to Pakistan, you go to sub-Saharan Africa, it's become a kind of a solution that you just opt into. It was like the cell phone. While we were waiting for so long for wired landlines to take over as a sign of, you know, human development. Cell phone technology disrupted everything, including banking. I know that's a long-winded way of asking you, but what are you wishing for to kind of accelerate that tipping point?

You just mentioned it, actually, the word tipping point, I think is critical here. And it's something that we looked at also when developing the last Global Sustainable Development Report, evaluating the SDGs.